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Re: English people are infact German!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary W
Quite simply, we cannot - and the view of many contemporary historians is that the association of Celts with the Hallstatt culture is an error, originating with a misreading of Herodotus. He referred to the Celtai living at the source of the Danube (which would indeed place them in Central Europe). Unfortunately, he thought the Danube originated in "Pyrene" - ie the borders of modern France/Spain.

Itĺs probable that our entire understanding of Indo-European settlement in Europe and the process by which cultures emerged from that needs revising. Increasingly I am coming to accept the possibility that there was no single spontaneous movement of Indo-European speakers but rather several. For example there is good evidence suggesting that the first settlers who entered Europe bearing farming technology c.6,000BC were Indo-European speakers, whilst those who we refer to as ôKurgan Cultureö emerging from the Eurasian steppe lands from 4,000BC onwards were also Indo-European speakers. In the eastern Mediterranean there is evidence for IE presence in pre-Mycenaean Greece and even in the Levant and Hyksos controlled Lower Egypt.

Linguistically, as I posted above, there are definite differences between Celtic/Italic languages on one side and Germanic/Slavic on the other. We also see in European indigenous practices a similar pattern. Taking Germanic Heathenism as an example the Wen/Vanir may have their ultimate origins in agricultural sacrificial rites brought into Europe along with farming whilst the Ese/Aesir may have their origin within the more warlike and aggressive Kurgan cultural bearers who arrived off the steppe lands. It is also noted in Zoroastrianism that there was a perceptible change within steppe culture, probably conditioned by contact with the proto-IE people of eastern Anatolia and Armenia that led to a more aggressive set of behaviours that we see in the Aryan settlements of Iran and India.

It is indeed probable that Celtic developed somewhere along the Atlantic sea board as a lingua franca that found its way into Central Europe before or around the emergence of the Hallstatt Culture. Its also probable that its development took in two separate regions perhaps a proto homeland north of the Alps before its division from Italic and a later development in Iberia and from there up into the British Isles.

They may not always have enjoyed the most cordial of relations, but English and German people have more in common than they might think. An analysis of the genetic make-up of today's British population suggests that almost all English people are descended from Saxon invaders who became masters of a two-tier society that battered indigenous Brits into submission.

The analysis lends weight to the theory that the Anglo-Saxon invaders, although relatively few in number, managed to take over almost the entire country by setting up a system of social segregation similar to apartheid in South Africa, in which the established locals were made second-class citizens.

The idea that modern English are of German descent is not new. Previous genetic studies have suggested that more than 50% of English Y chromosomes (the chromosome passed on unchanged from father to son) are all but identical to those of German and Danish natives.

But there has been a problem in explaining how the Anglo-Saxons managed to breed so successfully in Britain in the 300 years or so after their invasion in the fifth century AD. Simple mathematical analyses suggest that this level of breeding would have required an invading party more than half-a-million strong to make an impression on the estimated two million Britons living on the island at the time. Archaeologists argued that there is no evidence of such a mass influx of foreigners.

Easy advantage
ôLook at the language we speak - it's Germanic. And we are ostensibly gentically German.ö
Mark Thomas

University College London
This paradox disappears, however, if you consider a society in which the invaders muscled their way to the top of society, where they could breed more successfully, say the British researchers behind the new study. According to their computer model, somewhere between 10,000 and 200,000 invaders would have been needed to make their mark on the population, says Mark Thomas of University College London, who led the study.
The Anglo-Saxons may have forced indigenous Britons into servitude, while enjoying superior wealth, health and breeding potential, Thomas and his colleagues suggest in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

If the invading men were 1.8 times more likely than the locals to reproduce successfully, the researchers note, it would take only five generations, or 175 years, for the Germanic Y chromosome to exceed 50% prevalence in the population as a whole.

The study examined only the spread of the male lineage: sons fathered by Saxon men but born to native British women would therefore count as a spread of the Germanic line. "But I'm willing to bet that if you looked at the maternal line you would see the same pattern," says Thomas, although he thinks it may not be quite so starkly defined.

Lofty status
An apartheid-like system is the explanation that fits best with sociological evidence, Thomas argues. Historical records of the law of the time, for example, suggest that the fines payable to the family of a murdered Anglo-Saxon were far higher than those for a dead Briton. "There could conceivably have been wholesale slaughter or wholesale rape, but those explanations are the stuff of films really," he says.

Obvious signs of the invasion persist today. "Look at the language we speak it's Germanic. We are ostensibly German," Thomas says.

How did the German marauders manage to attain such a lofty status, given that they were in the minority? "They were invaders; they were trained," Thomas says. "And the British had been hammered by the Romans for years."

There are, however, corners of Britain that seem to have remained resolutely British. Thomas and his colleagues point out that, although most English and German Y chromosomes bear a strong similarity, both are markedly different from those of Welsh people today. "The differences still persist," says Thomas. "Even if not enshrined into law, people from different groups often tend not to interbreed."

I wonder how you English think about this article. Do you agree with it or think it's nonsense?

What about this?

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Ancient Britons come mainly from Spain

Scientists have discovered the British are descended from a tribe of Spanish fishermen. DNA analysis has found the Celts Ś Britain's indigenous population Ś have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to a tribe of Iberians from the coastal regions of Spain who crossed the Bay of Biscay almost 6,000 years ago.

People of Celtic ancestry were thought to have descended from tribes of central Europe. But Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, said: "About 6,000 years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats that enabled them to push up the Channel.

"Before they arrived, there were some human inhabitants of Britain, but only a few thousand. These people were later subsumed into a larger Celtic tribe... the majority of people in the British Isles are actually descended from the Spanish."

A team led by Professor Sykes Ś who is soon to publish the first DNA map of the British Isles Ś spent five years taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to produce a map of our genetic roots.

The most common genetic fingerprint belongs to the Celtic clan, which Professor Sykes has called "Oisin". After that, the next most widespread originally belonged to tribes of Danish and Norse Vikings. Small numbers of today's Britons are also descended from north African, Middle Eastern and Roman clans.

These DNA fingerprints have enabled Professor Sykes to create the first genetic maps of the British Isles, which are analysed in his book Blood Of The Isles, published this week. The maps show that Celts are most dominant in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

But the Celtic clan is also strongly represented elsewhere in the British Isles. "Although Celts have previously thought of themselves as being genetically different from the English, this is emphatically not the case," said Professor Sykes.

I have at last got my hands on C. Capelli et al.: A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles, Current Biology, vol. 13, 979-984, 27 May 2003.

Capelli et al. took DNA samples from men in 25 small towns around the British Isles, excluding men whose paternal grandfathers were born more than 20 miles away. For comparison they also took samples from Norway, Denmark, North Germany (Schleswig-Holstein), Friesland (Netherlands), and the Basque region of Spain. Using comparison of Y chromosome haplotypes, the Danish, North German and Frisian samples are all closely similar to each other, but the Norwegian sample is significantly different from these, and the Basque sample is widely different.

In a Principal Components analysis the Irish and Welsh samples (with one exception) cluster together with the Basque sample, supporting earlier findings. As the Basques speak a pre-Indo-European language, this suggests that the Irish and Welsh (so-called ‘Celts’) have a largely pre-Celtic genetic ancestry, possibly going back to the Palaeolithic. In Britain, the Orkneys, Shetlands, Western Isles, Isle of Man, and Cumbria (Penrith) show a clear Norwegian input, as expected. Elsewhere in mainland Britain there is no obvious Norwegian input, but varying degrees of German/Danish ancestry. Scottish mainland sites are intermediate between English sites and the ‘indigenous’ (Welsh/Irish) ones. However, all the English and Scottish sites show some ‘indigenous’ ancestry. The German/Danish component is strongest in eastern England and weakest in England south of the Thames.

Most of this is unsurprising, but there are two more controversial conclusions.
One is the claim that ‘the results seem to suggest that in England the Danes had a greater demographic impact than the Anglo-Saxons’. This is based on the finding that the German/Danish element is strongest in areas like Yorkshire that are known to have been settled by Danes. The conclusion seems to me a non-sequitur. The areas settled by Danes were the areas most exposed to invasion from Denmark and North Germany, and they got a double dose of German/Danish genes: first from the Angles, then the Danes. It would be very surprising if they did not have the strongest German/Danish element.

The other controversial conclusion is that the German/Danish element in southern England (south of the Thames) is limited, and that the male ancestry of this area ‘appears to be predominantly indigenous’. This may be true, but I would want to see it replicated with different samples and methods before taking it as firmly established. It should perhaps be noted that the samples with the smallest German/Danish element all come from areas (Wessex, Sussex, and Kent) reputedly settled by Saxons and Jutes, while the samples with larger German/Danish elements come from areas settled by Angles (East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria). Conceivably there was already a genetic difference between these three ethnic groups before migration, though this does not seem particularly likely, as they all came from much the same area of Northern Europe.

As Capelli et al. recognise, their results seem to conflict with those of Weale et al., ‘Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2002, vol. 19, pp.1008-21, which found a sharp distinction between central English and Welsh populations, but no significant difference between the English population and a Frisian sample. This discrepancy needs to be reconciled.

As I am a historian and not a geneticist it may help if I outline the historical evidence on the ethnic origins of the English. There is no dispute that British Celtic) elements were predominant in Cornwall and Cumbria, where Celtic languages survived long after the Anglo-Saxon invasions. There is also good evidence of British elements surviving in Kent and Wessex (see esp. Myres, ‘The English Settlements’, pp.147-73). But beyond that, there has been controversy since Victorian times. At one extreme, which I call the ‘Wipeout’ theory, it is believed that Celts were virtually exterminated or expelled by the invading Anglo-Saxons. At the other extreme, which I call the ‘Upper Crust’ theory, the Anglo-Saxons took over as a ruling elite but left the peasants largely untouched (rather like the later Norman Conquest). And of course there are intermediate positions.

The main lines of evidence are as follows:

Written sources: the main sources - Gildas, Bede, and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle - make it clear that invaders from the Continent took political control of what is now England, and that in many places there was violent conflict between the invaders and native forces. But there are no reliable written sources on the numbers and proportions of different groups.

Language: the Old English or Anglo-Saxon language, in its various forms, is purely Germanic in its grammar and vocabulary, with no discernible Celtic element. If the Celts learned English, they learned it very thoroughly. The later Danish settlements strongly influenced the form of Old English spoken in eastern England, but did not replace it.

Place-names: the names of major towns and rivers often show some derivation from Celtic or Romano-British names, but the names of rural settlements are overwhelmingly Germanic (Anglo-Saxon or Danish), except in western England, where there is a ‘cline’ of increasing Celtic influence. However, there have been controversial claims that some Anglo-Saxon names have disguised Celtic origins.

Continental evidence: before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England there were people known as Angles in northern Germany, and after it there weren’t. Around the same time, the Armorican peninsula was settled by Celtic Britons, to the extent that the area became known as Britain (Bretagne or Brittany). This certainly looks like a mass displacement of populations.

Religion: late Roman Christianity and Celtic religions disappeared from England and were replaced by Anglo-Saxon paganism until Christian missionaries from Ireland and Rome arrived.

Archaeology: there are few recognisable remains of any kind from the 5th century. After that, archaeological remains are mainly Germanic in style. It was formerly assumed by archaeologists that a change in style of this kind involved a migration of people, but the recent tendency has been to assume that styles change by ‘cultural diffusion’ or elite influence. Sometimes archaeologists seem to forget that ‘no conclusive proof that A’ is not the same
as ‘conclusive proof that not-A’.

Social structure and customs: the evidence from Anglo-Saxon poetry, laws, etc., is of a Germanic/Scandinavian society and customs. However, some sources do refer to ‘wealh’ (Welsh) inhabitants, who are presumed to be surviving Britons. The laws of Ine, king of Wessex in the late 7th century, make it clear that ‘wealh’ people could be either free or slaves (theow), and that they could belong to ‘wealh’ kinship groups, which implies survival of more than isolated individuals. Also, some charters and other documents refer to substantial numbers of slaves. (It complicates matters that the word ‘wealh’ itself, which originally meant ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’, may sometimes be used to mean ‘slave’, implying status rather than necessarily ethnic origin.)

The positive evidence, so far as it goes, seems to me consistent with something closer to the ‘Wipeout’ theory than the ‘Upper Crust’ theory, though with survival of ‘wealh’ populations in varying proportions. The advocates of the ‘Upper Crust’ theory rely heavily on an ‘argument from impossibility’: it is impossible, they say, that a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxon invaders can have wiped out a much larger Romano-British population. However, I think this is a misunderstanding of the invasion scenario. Roman-British society rapidly broke down when the Romans left. Even without invasion there would have been a population crash. The Romano-British were virtually defenceless apart from mercenaries who were themselves mainly Germans (Saxons), and quick to invite their relatives over to share the spoils. To destroy a defenceless population, it is not necessary to kill them individually. Just take a few captives in the first village you come to, skin some of them alive in the market-place, and let the rest of them go to spread the news. A wave of panicking refugees will spread out in all directions, and starvation and disease will do the rest. For analogy, suppose you heard that Martians with invincible weapons and sadistic habits had landed twenty miles away. You would run like buggery!

However, the feasibility of a scenario does not mean it is true. Further genetic evidence may finally resolve the controversy. If it is in fact proved that the ‘Celtic’ element was predominant in southern England, this would have interesting implications for cultural history and evolution, for it would show that a complete change of language and culture can be imposed by a dominant minority, in an illiterate pre-industrial society, and in a short period of time.